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Study of Text, Chapter 9, II. The Answer to Prayer, P 10. 1-8-15

II. The Answer to Prayer, P 10
10 If paying is equated with getting, you will set the price low but demand a high return. You will have forgotten, however, that to price is to value, so that your return is in proportion to your judgment of worth. If paying is associated with giving it cannot be perceived as loss, and the reciprocal relationship of giving and receiving will be recognized. The price will then be set high, because of the value of the return. The price for getting is to lose sight of value, making it inevitable that you will not value what you receive. Valuing it little, you will not appreciate it and you will not want it.

Journal
I don’t know if it is just me, but I had a hard time with this paragraph. I asked Jesus to help me understand what it is he wants me to know about it and so it started to unravel for me. This is the example that came to my mind.

At work, I pay my time and effort and I expect to get a paycheck and benefits in return. I had not until now thought of it this way, but I want to give as little of my time and effort as possible and in return I want to receive as high a paycheck as I can. I also want my benefits to be good and get better with time. So I set the low price of little effort and time but demand a high return in pay and benefits.

Jesus reminds me that to price is to value so this means that in setting a low price (low amount of time and effort) I have set a low value on my time and effort. Yikes! Now here is an interesting thing. I used to be very excited about my job and enjoyed watching my commissions grow. I used to put a lot of effort into my work and I loved that my effort was making my company grow. But then I lost interest in the competitive nature of the job and so I stopped caring about this part of it.

I still do my job, but I also resent the time I put into it, and my focus is on retirement. What I have also noticed is that I have recently felt undervalued and underappreciated in a way that I never have before. I had never put the two things together until now. I thought that my value was being set by my company but it is actually being set by me. As I have often said, but failed to recognize in this case, is that it is never about someone else, but always a reflection of my own mind.

Jesus also is telling me that I can associate giving with receiving. How would that work at my job? Well, I have lost interest in the competitive nature of the job, but I can shift my desire from giving to get to giving for the sheer joy of it, giving because I know I always give to myself, giving because as I give I receive. From this place I will naturally place great value on giving and what I receive will be of great value.

I notice as I write this I feel resistance to the idea of shifting my way of thinking. Listening to the ego reasoning I have thoroughly bought into the idea that the solution to my problem lies in changing the world rather than changing my mind. But I also see that this is not working, and that actually my false logic is making the problem worse. So I ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of this obviously flawed reasoning. I ask that my thinking be corrected and my mind healed.

As my mind is healed, and I allow myself to give as I would receive, to place high value on giving and thus receiving high value in return, I can expect everything about my job to change. As Jesus says, “The price for getting is to lose sight of value, making it inevitable that you will not value what you receive. Valuing it little, you will not appreciate it and you will not want it.”

I have caused myself to lose sight of value in my one sided thinking. This is very much the ego way of thinking. The ego is all about giving in order to get and it always wants to win because it actually believes there is someone else to be in competition with. I have lost sight of true value as I did this, and I have experienced it reflected in my life as losing value to my company. I have valued my job little and lost appreciation for it and do not want it. I can easily turn this around and that is what I choose to do.

I choose to do this, not because the job is the issue, but because the job is showing me what it looks like to give in order to get. It is reflecting to me the effect of misplacing value. I am choosing to do this differently at work because I want a healed mind. I am using work as a way of gaining clarity as to what is going on in my mind, and to give myself an opportunity to choose healing.

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